Here is where the startup revolution is brewing in India
Starting up straight out of college is becoming acceptable and entrepreneurship is slowly but surely being accepted as a viable career path. But stepping a rung lower, the real startup push is coming from the colleges where students are starting up ventures for fun, learning (and of course the extra cash) in their early years in college. The awareness has spread across the IIT's and other premier colleges like BITs and some of the NIT's where students freshly into college are thinking of starting up ventures on their own.
Meet Jaisal Rathee, a second year political science student at the prestigious Delhi University. An ardent follower of YourStory, Jaisal has always bounced of his ideas with the startup circle and his latest effort is called Teewow- Crowd funded custom apparel. It allows you to sell custom tees with zero upfront costs, and zero risk. To set the ball rolling, one needs to launch a campaign (send it to Teewow), spread the word and reach a goal of pre fixed t-shirts that need to be bought before the order goes into print. 4 campaigns are currently on (including the one for The Indian Backpacker).
And, as a side note, these are some pretty impressive FB creds for a 19 year old:
Shobhit Bakliwal of BITS Pilani is another such enthusiast who is always busy working on some or the other product. After PollDaal, he is currently at work on Bat Notes! and is pretty much clued in to the making of a good product which is sometimes lacking in many senior professionals. And it's not just tech geeks, there are students like Subodh Kolhe who're more into the 'Business' side of startups and are good at marketing.
These students are probably not doing something that'll change the world with their current products but the spirit and the whole sentiment behind their actions is encouraging. One can bet many of such young entrepreneurs go on and build some great stuff and hence efforts like BITS Sparks that encourage students to become entreprneurs while in college should be boosted.
There are others like Ritesh Agarwal who dropped out of college and still went on to win the Thiel Fellowship for his startup Oravel and is doing great currently. Pulkit Madan is another dropout who is working on Backit.co currently. But the bigger picture is the change that is coming about in colleges and how businesses are being looked at. BPlan competition now do go on to make successful businesses. The revolution has just begun and only the surface has been scratched. There is a long way to go till students in every college (not just engineering) are atleast aware about starting up and entrepreneurship as a career choice.
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